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Broadcast Peter Elleby is the IT Director at natural search specialists Hydra. It’s a company that, in layman's terms, tells its client how well they perform on the web and how to improve that performance. In order to do this it’s got to crunch and parse huge volumes of unstructured data. As a start-up that would have meant a significant hardware investment, so they turned to the Cloud to give them scalable data crunching on the fly.

On the 3rd of October at 11am BST / 12pm CEST, Peter will be in our studio with Reg host Lucy Sherrif, Dale Vile from our friends at Freeform Dynamics and Dr Michael Newbury from Microsoft, to explain why he chose the cloud route.

Having evaluated a few options, Hadoop and Amazon amongst others, Elleby chose Azure for reasons he’ll explain. He’ll also explain to you why he ruled out the others. It’s not all been plain sailing of course and Elleby explains the challenges thrown up by the platform choice – including SQL Azure size limits and throttling.

Between them, the panel will cover some of the basic principles, including the three V’s of big data and why as practitioners they reckon there’s one V missing. More importantly, they’ll be discussing how all of this translates to practical stuff like decision criteria for software and services, design decisions you’re gonna need to make when implementing, and how the cloud option can allow you to do things in this space that would never be cost effective though installing on-site kit.